Amazon affiliate on TV / SAT 3-21-26 / Not accepting, perhaps / Accepted defeat, in modern parlance / Things that are tough on the outside and doughy on the inside? / Creatures that attack Isengard, in fantasy / Sculptor Jeff known for his steel balloon animals / Cavalry member in Russia, historically / Parts of a story structure? / Titular Dr. Seuss character

Constructor: Boaz Moser

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Nowell Codex / Cotton MS Vitellius A XV (2D: Classic poem whose sole surviving manuscript is kept in the British Library = BEOWULF) —

The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Old English poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf. In addition to this, it contains first a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher, then the more complete texts Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and, after Beowulf, a poetic translation of Judith. Due to the fame of Beowulf, the Nowell Codex is also sometimes known simply as the Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript is located within the British Library with the rest of the Cotton collection. // The current codex is a composite of at least two manuscripts. The main division is into two totally distinct books which were apparently not bound together until the 17th century. The first of these, originally owned by Southwick Priory in Hampshire, dates from the 12th century and contains four works of prose. // It is the second, older manuscript that is more famous. This second manuscript is known as the Nowell Codex, after the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose name is inscribed on its first page; he was apparently its owner in the mid-16th century. At some point it was combined with the first codex. It was then acquired by Sir Robert Cotton. In his library, it was placed on the first shelf (A) as the 15th manuscript (XV) of the bookcase that had a bust of the Emperor Vitellius, giving the collection its name. The Nowell Codex is generally dated around the turn of the first millennium. Recent editions have specified a probable date in the decade after 1000.

• • •

Another easy one today. No particularly exciting elements, but it's sturdy, ungunky, fine. Strangely, I think the NE corner is my favorite part—I say "strangely" because corners in a puzzle like this can seem like an afterthought, since all the showy stuff is happening in the middle. The answers themselves aren't particularly showy through that middle section, but the large amount of white space is. This is a grid that's built to showcase the stacks of long answers running through the center. The corners take whatever shape they take and you fill them best you can, but those corners aren't (typically) the stars. Today, though, the central answers seemed admirably smooth, but not very grabby. I also don't know what FREE RUNNING is. I guess if you're doing it, it's probably exciting, but as a two-word phrase, seems kind of meh. PARKOUR—a great-looking answer. FREE RUNNING? Meh. The middle is also security-obsessed in a way that I find unappealing (ARMORED CARS, SECURITY LEAK). And INTERNET TROLL, while a perfectly valid phrase, feels redundant (unless you are specifically trying to differentiate it from the kind that lives under a bridge, you'd just say "troll"). Again, everything through that middle seems acceptable, and I do love SWEET AND SOUR ... anything, really ... but there's just something more exciting about the NE corner. The dramatic declaration of "I WANT OUT!" The cliffhanger of "NEXT TIME..." And the detectives (SLEUTHS) lurking in the margins, surveilling their targets from the booth of a diner, drinking coffee and eating STEAKS (they're called "steak-outs" for a reason!). True, that corner does have a certain TOILET REEK, but that's part of the charm. Seriously, though, "I WANT OUT!" over "NEXT TIME..." is particularly nice. 

As for difficulty ... no. There wasn't any. I thought there might be when I couldn't get the Acrosses in the NW corner at first, but then I started in on the short Downs (ASK / MEET / STRAY) and then TASTE was obvious, and then bam, there's my old friend YEETS, and now we got something:

From here I can work those NW Acrosses from the back end. I was already thinking of "story" as a building part, so I-BEAMS didn't take too long (if you've seen a lot of crosswords, you've seen a lot of I-BEAMS). Wanted "Ready" to precede "SET," but "GET SET" was my next guess. I had a brief moment of wondering why "ETC ETC ETC" wouldn't fit at 3D: "And so forth" ... but then realized that the answer was actually the fully written out ET CETERA. From there, the solve took a fairly predictable path, as I followed the path of least resistance and flowed from the NW corner right through the center of the grid to the SE corner and then looped back up again, leaving only the much more cut-off NE and SW corners.

From there, it looked like the SW corner was going to be the harder one (tougher to get into a corner via the back ends of answers than the front ends), so I went there, expecting trouble, but instead I got TOOK THE "L" immediately (55A: Accepted defeat, in modern parlance). Like YEETS, it is slangy, and like YEETS, yes, you have seen it before. Well, not in the past tense—this is actually a debut—but there have been four TAKE THE "L"s since 2020—and I think I've posted this song every time:

Once TOOK THE "L" was in, the corner wasn't much trouble. IN DENIAL was slightly hard to parse (59A: Not accepting, perhaps), and I would've died on HIRONO without the crosses (40D: Hawaii senator Mazie), but the crosses were clear, so ... done. Finished up in the NE corner, which as I've said is my favorite part of the puzzle, so that was nice. Nice to end on a high note. All in all, clean, smooth, decent. Not much to excite or enrage, but ... it'll do.

[53D: Amazon affiliate on TV]
[She is affiliated with the Amazons]

Bullets:

• 27A: It's not nice to walk in this (SLEET) — I think I was thrown by the lack of wordplay in this clue. "Nice"? I was like "why that word? Is there some idiom being played on here?" But no. It's just ... unpleasant to walk in sleet. I would've said difficult, if not (at times) impossible. I remember trying to get home from school once in Ann Arbor and the streets and sidewalks were pure ice and my route was *slightly* uphill and ... things got comical. It was OK when I could just walk on people's lawns, but crossing streets ... even if I managed to stay upright, I sort of just ... slid ... back from where I came. It's possible I ended up (deliberately) on my hands and knees at some point. You gotta do what you gotta do.
• 31A: Brady bunch? : Abbr. (TDS) — ugh, a Tom Brady football clue. This was my least favorite thing about the NE. As "?" clues go, I liked the ARMORED CARS clue a lot better (35A: Things that are tough on the outside and doughy on the inside?) ('cause ARMORED CARS contain money, i.e. "dough").
• 43A: Sculptor Jeff known for his steel balloon animals (KOONS) — big weird puffy pink things, that's what I think when I think of KOONS. Whimsical. Vivid. Fun.

• 60A: Join arms? (ENLIST) — another "?" clue I didn't love. It just doesn't quite work, wordplay-wise. You join the army ... where you might carry arms ... I dunno. The phrasing just misses the mark. Also, still not really happy to see war-related answers right now (during "Operation: Furious Incompetence"), esp. when the puzzle tries to make it light-hearted.
• 25D: Valuable commodity in "Dune" (SPICE) — there's another Dune movie coming out later this year. Also, a Dune font generator has apparently been released for general use and as a result my social media feed has been overrun with textual ridiculousness. For example:

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Political commentator Piker / FRI 3-20-26 / Kachina-carving people / Dramatic outerwear for the theater / Participant in the Jacobite rebellion of the 1740s / Athlete nickname "O Rei" / Some scenery in "The Road Runner Show" / Viral 2010s dance that Hillary Clinton performed on TV / It has more than 4,000 islands off its coast

Constructor: Rafael Musa and Rebecca Goldstein

Relative difficulty: Very easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: HASAN Piker (5A: Political commentator Piker) —

Hasan Doğan Piker (born July 25, 1991), known online by the name HasanAbi, is an American Twitch streamer, influencer, and left-wing political commentator. His content primarily consists of political and social commentary and media consumption. As of 2026, Piker's Twitch channel ranks among the platform's most-subscribed. Piker has been described as one of the biggest voices on the U.S. left. Piker started streaming on Twitch in March 2018, while working at The Young Turks (TYT). [...] 

His uncle, Cenk Uygur, is a political commentator and co-founder of The Young Turks, a left-leaning news network.

In January 2020, he left TYT to focus on his career as a Twitch streamer. Piker has regularly spoken about the Gaza war by advocating for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli government. [...] 

Piker has been most commonly identified as a leftist, socialist, and Marxist. He has advocated in favor of workplace democracy, universal health care, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-Zionism, and gun control. Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker described Piker as anti-Trump but "hardly a loyal Democrat". Instead, Marantz classified Piker as an "old-school leftist," critical of the "American empire". In an interview with GQ magazine, Piker stated that his goal was to push the Democratic Party to be more progressive. Intelligencer called Piker "the AOC of Twitch".

 (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle has some lovely long answers, particularly the crossing grid-spanners (SURPRISE PARTIES, "JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR...") and the plea "GO EASY ON ME." But that plea felt deeply ironic, as this puzzle went easy on me from the first clue and never stopped going easy on me, and so with no real challenge and no other really sparkly answers, I ended up feeling a little disappointed. The grid is perfectly solid and smooth, it just came in a tad dull from me. Several of the longer answers, while completely unobjectionable, felt disappointingly listless. E-SCOOTERS feels like 9-letter crosswordese to me by now. I see AMINO in the grid So Much that AMINO ACIDS was not a particularly welcome sight. Hard to think of a longer answer plainer and ho-hummier than HOME SALES. All the other longer answers hold up, but the great stuff is basically offset by the duller stuff, and so I was left feeling just so-so about the whole thing. It's possible that I'm being unfair, that I expect so much from these constructors (two of my favorites) that anything short of stellar ends up seeming mildly disappointing. At any rate, I definitely enjoyed parts of this, and I think it's well made. I just wanted more sizzle. And a lot more challenge.

There is easy and there is Easy, and then apparently there is also Easy, a new, italicized level of "easy" I had to invent just for this puzzle. Do you know how fast I got to here?:

Ten seconds, tops. As fast as I could type: ASAP went in (1A: Rush order), and then I went backward from "P" to "A" doing all the crosses, 1-2-3-4, no hesitation. That is a Monday-level corner, no exaggeration. Coming across those longer answers was a *little* bit harder, but only because I couldn't think of a word to follow GAME besides PRESERVE (or RESERVE). It's "wildlife refuge," "game (p)reserve," at least in my brain, so I had to work crosses there, but that didn't take long. 

The one part of the puzzle I did have some trouble with was immediately adjacent to the GAME REFUGE—despite his being "one of the biggest voices on the U.S. Left" (wikipedia), I—an extremely tiny voice on the U.S. left—have never heard of HASAN Piker (5A: Political commentator Piker). This may have something to do with the fact that I try as hard as possible to listen to zero political commentators—go out of my way not to hear any of them—and also something to do with the fact that except for the few times I've live-streamed cryptic-crossword solves with my friends Rachel and Neville, I have spent almost zero time on Twitch (which is apparently where HASAN Piker reigns). This is because I am old, and I have no interest in gaming (which is mostly what gets streamed on Twitch). I cannot imagine watching political commentary on Twitch or YouTube. But then, as I've said, I can't really imagine watching it At All at this point. The rise of the "political commentator" has been concomitant with the death of journalism and the rise of fascism and I don't think these phenomena are unrelated. So I will read political commentary, sometimes, but all the camera-facing, look-at-me, for-the-Likes performance ... it's not for me. I would prefer not. The pivot-to-video moment in our culture has not had any discernible positive impact that I'm aware of. What we get is fragmentation and polarization. And profit, presumably, for some few people. It would be great if all the video "engagement" resulted in a better world. I mean this world, actual world [reaches out and touches desk and lamp and other objects in three-dimensional space]. So far ... Well, you tell me how it's going. Sorry, where was I? Oh, right, didn't know HASAN, and the "N" cross was wild. Wildly vague, anyway: 9D: Basic ___. I had the "EE" and thought FEES and even TEES before the "D" from DINERO made "NEED" clear. After the HASAN/NEED moment—whoosh, puzzle went up in flames so fast that I barely remember the experience.

[SCOT]

Bullets:

• 44A: Danish money (KRONE) — managed to avoid all the "which spelling is it?!" drama by getting that terminal "E" first (from 41D: "Get it?").
• 47A: Word repeated in "With a ___ ___ here and a ___ ___ there ..." (MOO) — this is maybe the greatest clue in the history of crosswords. Certainly the greatest fill-in-the-blank clue. Maximalist bovine lunacy. Love it.
• 12D: Dramatic outerwear for the theater (OPERA COAT) — cannot believe I got tangled up in competing operawear terms, but isn't OPERA CAPE a thing? I feel sure that it is. When I think olde-tymey operagoing, I think top hats, lorgnettes, and capes! Coats? You can wear a coat any old time. But a cape!? Well, unless you are COSPLAYing a superhero (36D: Be a hero, say), there are very few options. Looks like OPERA COAT outgoogles OPERA CAPE by about 5-to-1, so I reluctantly withdraw my objection, which was never really an objection in the first place, just an enthusiasm for capes. 
• 42D: Viral 2010s dance that Hillary Clinton performed on TV (NAE NAE) — first of all, dated crosswordese, boo. Second of all, I would've been perfectly content if this clue had stopped at "dance." More than content. Happy. In retrospect, thrilled. You wanna know what piece of video I won't be looking up today? ... Sigh, now I feel like I have to look it up, as a public disservice. Let's see ... hang on ... alright, I got it, and ... oh, OK, I saw three seconds of it, and I wish I'd stuck to my initial instincts. (I wonder why the clue didn't say she performed it on Ellen — "on TV" is weak—unless she performed it on multiple shows, in which case, no wonder she lost (I kid! I voted for her, relax...))

• 47D: It has more than 4,000 islands off its coast (MAINE) — damn that is a lot of islands. Who counted? Give that person a raise. Unless a computer counted. Please do not give the computer a raise.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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